


The Dentists' Daughter

by Whatho



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Dentistry, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-20
Updated: 2010-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:55:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whatho/pseuds/Whatho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'They're dentists, so they're not that interesting' - JK Rowling</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dentists' Daughter

The dentists keep their daughter's bedroom pristine, like a shrine. The lightbulb's not been changed in an eon and the mattress is springy as the day it was bought. It's a childish room: not really fit for a girl of sixteen, with its nursery-ish paint and its too-short bed and its big-print pre-teen library. A while back their daughter was a voracious reader of novels, of poetry, history books and plays. Top of her class and the vocab of a grown-up. But still the shelf at the head of the bed holds a selection fit only for a prodigious child of eleven.

The dentist, at the end of the summer term, just as she's done for the past five years, burgles that bookshelf and balances a half-finished copy of The Wind in the Willows on the corner of the coffee table nearest her daughter's armchair. The bookmark's a train ticket to Brighton from the summer of 1991, bought on a family railcard. The front cover's wrinkled, folded and creased, the spine bent back in the middle, the first hundred pages all avidly dog-eared and cocoa-stained from too much illicit post-bedtime reading. The rest are quite pristine.

The dentist sits down in her daughter's armchair to check the volume's sufficiently alluring from that angle. Then she admires the armrests. The varnish on her own chair's wooden armrests has worn back to a smattering of speckles; her husband's similarly stripped down to an anaemic pine. He worries the wood with the heels of his hands. Only their daughter's could pass for mahogany.

She strokes the armrests with her forefingers, over and over, but her prints are wearing faster than the grain.

*

In the middle of the hols, in his strangely empty house, the dentist holds on the palm of his hand the remnants of a brace. It used to fix his daughter's teeth – he did the job himself. That was his super power.

Kids all think their dad's a secret wizard. Mum fights crime by night. She never believed the pair of them were dentists. When she twigged at seven or so that there wasn't a hidden world for them beyond molars and mouthwash and unduly obsessive flossing, he talked up all his years of study. But he plays that game more childishly these days. He falls back on the wizardry. Claims he's magic dental powers beyond the ken of all your Merlins and your Gandalfs. She doesn't know who Gandalf is, but she's manners enough to pretend that her parents do, after all, know something she doesn't; can fix things with their hands and their eyes that she'd otherwise grimly suffer.

The dentists' daughter's teeth are Hollywood perfect now, so he stows the twist of metal in the pocket of his shirt and wonders if she talks about him to the friends he never meets. If she talks up his expertise and his magic touch with a periodontal probe and how he used local on her gums every time he had to inject, for all that she's a stoic, because the point was never to hurt her. If he gets the prefix 'only'.

He thinks he might buy a quarter pound of humbugs.

One summer they went skiing. They saved for two years and cleared a whole fortnight and lodged themselves in a hollow in the mountains, hemmed in by glaciers, scanning the sky for unwanted and wholly longed-for birds of prey. There's a photo from the first week, the three of them smiling broadly and desperately and falsely in chunky familial Fair Isle knits. His daughter wanted to develop it herself. That's another thing she can do. The dentists insisted on Boots. It lives unblinking on the mantelpiece, being oppressively normal, sort of standing guard. Their daughter can escape through a fire.

She couldn't unfasten the clasp on her bindings to snap her feet from the skis. The dentist had to pop her free with all the weight of his expertise and his love and his middle-aged spread. Only the once though. Turned out she didn't think much to skiing.

*

The dentist, at the start of the winter term, washes the sheets that had two nights' wear, picks the half-finished copy of The Wind in the Willows from the coffee table and wraps it in plain brown paper. She contemplates the sellotape. The look of the thing's important. She settles instead on a ball of hairy string.

Impossibly far in the distance she hears a passing train let off a burst of a steam, they way they mostly don't these days.

The dentist takes a quill, of all things, and writes her daughter's name on the front of the package in proper ink from an old-fashioned inkwell: an anniversary present to her husband that wasn't actually meant to make him cry. She carries her bundle to the nearest window, pulls it to so she can't hear the engine, and scans all the neighbouring chimney pots. She doesn't bother looking out a stamp.

*

'Rinse,' says the dentist, and the boy spits pinkly into the basin. The dentist swings the lamp aside and picks at the latex on his wrists. His eyes wander lazily over the slightly swollen half-paralysed face gamely dribbling a second dose of mouthwash onto the lino. The lad must be the same age as his daughter.

'Do I know you?' asks the dentist. He glances again at the card and again at the boy. 'What primary school …?'

The boy dabs at his chin with a tissue and checks it briefly for blood. 'Primary school?' he says. 'I'm sixteen. I'm at catering college.'

'I know it's going back a bit.'

'St Luke's.' He swings his legs to the ground and ducks to avoid the light. 'What for?'

The dentist nods and pulls his mask away, gulps at the antiseptic air. 'My daughter,' he says. 'She went there too'. The boy half-nods, non-committal. 'Did you know her?'

The boy checks the surname on the door. He furrows his brow.

'I don't remember ….'

'She was the blue fairy in Pinocchio. Standard Three. You were Jiminy Cricket.'

The boy unfurrows. He pauses, one arm in his coat.

'I've got it on video,' says the dentist.

'Thought I'd had them all burned. But yeah. Yeah. I do know the kid you mean. She had Gordon Carter's cricket bat for a magic wand.'

The dentist swallows, hard; draws the boy's files protectively to his ribs. 'That's right,' he says.

'I got her now. The dentists' daughter. Both her parents, dentists. What happened to her?'

'Sorry?'

'She never showed up at Old Church Road. She go some other place?'

'She ….'

'Never see her in the holidays either.'

'No. You, er … you need to make an appointment with the hygienist.'

The boy stares hard, shrugging back into his hood. The dentist taps a biro on the bridge of his glasses.

'But did she …?

'Bit of bleeding from the gums there. The receptionist'll sort you. See you in six months' time.'

There's a long quiet pause while the boy listens hard in the air for his answer and the dentist bites the end of his pen into splinters.

'Oh,' says the boy, in the end.

*

The surgery door closes solemnly; respectful, like it would on an invalid, and the dentist picks his face out of his hands as he twigs: he's sent the boy away thinking that the dentists' daughter's dead. He ought really to recall him; tell reception he needs to recommend a softer toothbrush or teach the boy how to floss properly. Give him a name. St something or other. The scholarship story he gives to his parents. Don't let him walk away all twinged by misplaced grief. But he's seated still when the outer door pulls to.

Something sort of hoots in the car park. The dentist, and the dentist one floor up, a brown paper parcel still waiting in her hand, cross as one to the window. Disappearing behind the recycling skips they catch a glimpse of the tail-feathers of a woodpigeon they thought might be an owl.


End file.
